Richard Wright and Langston Hughes

Richard Wright

“The Man Who Was Almost a Man”

In this story, Dave struggles with his vulnerability and insecurities. He wants more than anything to gain respect and be regarded as a man by his family and community. His approach to achieve this goal, however, unfortunately, causes these significant people in his life to respect him even less. Is Dave’s decision to fire the gun in an unsafe place a reflection of his maturity or intellect? Should a person be respected as an adult when he reaches a certain age or when he is capable of thinking as an adult? I think the latter suffices. Perhaps, the conditions in which Dave grew up in—constantly working in the field and being treated like a child—kept him from maturing intellectually. Just the fact that he “needs” a gun to be a man shows that he is not quite ready to make that forward step into adulthood, but would he have ever been under the said conditions? In my personal opinion, Dave’s final decision to run away from home and become independent from his family and opinions of his community was the first positive step to becoming a man. While he still seemed attached to the gun at the end of the story, I think that by escaping from the people that instigated and sustained his insecurities, he would realize his power as an individual apart from his weapon.


Langston Hughes

Hughes does an excellent job portraying the condition of blacks in America during the early-to-mid 1900’s. All of his poetry, in some way, expresses the frustration of blacks and their united hope that one day they would truly obtain freedom. One of my favorite poems of Hughes is “Mulatto.” His usage of dialogue between the young boy and the white man interested me. I also thought that he effectively used descriptive scents and images to describe a black woman’s body and its insignificance to the slave owner. “I, Too” was another poem that caught my attention. The optimism that the speaker of the poem uses reminded me a lot of Booker T. Washington’s positive outlook on blacks in American society. Like Washington, the speaker in “I, Too” realizes that change cannot occur instantaneously with the declared freedom of his race; however, he looks confidently and calmly into the future, and, despite the pain that America had caused him thus far, he still ends the poem stating, “I, too, am America.”